Should my portfolio be public or private? How do I decide?

First, know your audience. Who is going to be viewing your portfolio: an instructor, an admissions counselor for graduate school,  a future employer? Knowing who your audience will be is the first step in your decision process.

Once you know your audience, think about what you want them to be able to view in your ePortfolio. Is there anything in your site that they should be restricted from seeing? Depending on your discipline, consider if there are images, data or other content that should not be seen by the public but may need to be reviewed by an instructor. If you have multiple audiences and the content each of those audiences can see varies, consider limiting access to certain pages in your site. Page-level permissions enable you to set different levels of access for different people on different pages.

Keep in mind that setting your site to public overrides any page-level permissions you may have set up. Public means anyone, anywhere on the Internet can view your site. According to Google, “Visitors to your site will always be granted the highest level of access available to them, even if you’ve deleted them from a specific page.”

If you are going to be constantly modifying your site and adding new pages where controlling the site’s access page by page is too challenging, consider having more than one site. Tools like Google Sites allow you to have more than one site. Sites can even be copied so that all your content does not have to be recreated. Then you can add new content, delete content, or modify it for a particular audience. For example, you create a portfolio that is targeted toward getting accepted to graduate school. This site has a specific purpose and audience and can be used over and over again on your graduate school applications. You could create another site that you use for career opportunities, one that you would send to a recruiter or future employer. You could also create a portfolio for a specific course or program during your time at the University. If you have multiple sites, you can vary the privacy settings for each site. One portfolio may be public, another private, and shared with a limited number of users.

So what are your options for privacy settings and what do they mean? If you are using Google Sites within Google Apps at UD, you will have the following options when you click on Share:

1. Public on the web (Anyone on the Internet can find and access. No sign-in required.)
2. Anyone with the link (Anyone who has the link can access. No sign-in required.)
3. University of Delaware (People at UD can find and access.)
4. People at University of Delaware with the link (People at UD who have the link can access.)
5. Private (Only people explicitly granted permission can access. Sign-in required.)

If you are using Google Sites through Google.com and not Google Apps at UD, you will have options 1, 2 and 5.

Sites or blogs created on WordPress.com are usually public by default. You can select a setting, “I would like my site to be private, visible only to users I choose.” Once set, you can “Invite viewers to your blog.”

Once you have decided who needs to see specific content and whether you are using one or more sites, think about this. If your site is not Public, consider the user experience when sharing your portfolio. Do they have to create an account to view your portfolio? Do they need to sign in and what does that entail? If you were the user, what would you expect, what would you want that experience to be?

Coming soon in my next post: Sharing my portfolio when it is private